Civil Defense: Coffins or Shields?

“Shelters against atomic and hydrogen bombs are nothing but coffins and tombs prepared in advance. There is no bunker, not even hermetically sealed, where one could sit quietly through explosions of atomic and hydrogen bombs.”

With those words, the Soviet Union’s Minister of Defense, Marshal Rodion Y. Malinovsky, in the course of a rocket-rattling Moscow interview, last week injected himself from afar into the U.S. shelter debate. President Kennedy has already asked Congress for $700 million in fiscal 1963 for an accelerated civil defense program, which aims eventually at creating shelter space for 180 million Americans. Two congressional subcommittees plan to scrutinize the President’s request; one is headed by Texan Albert Thomas, in the past an effective foe of civil defense spending; the other by Californian Chet Holifield, who wants the Government to spend vastly more on shelters.

Meanwhile, U.S. scientists continue to be deeply divided on the question of shelters, though the antishelter school of thought has probably grown recently, partly because of Khrushchev’s monster explosions of last fall. Seymour Melman. professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University, says, “The fallout shelter program cannot protect—period.” “The enemy can negate all our defense, as we can his,” says Dr. Barry Commoner, professor of plant physiology at St. Louis’ Washington University. “A nuclear war would be self-defeating. There is no way out through a shelter program.” Others, like Physical Chemist Eugene Rabino-witch, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, believe that a U.S. shelter program would be prudent, but fear that any basement or backyard shelters the U.S. might come up with “would become obsolete even before they could be constructed across the country.”

A number of scientists still argue stoutly that shelters are both necessary and effective. Dr. Herman Kahn, physicist and mathematician, director of the Hudson Institute, a nonprofit research group concerned with national security, and the author of On Thermonuclear War, says: “Civil defense could not only save millions of lives but could also prove crucial to the continued survival of Western ideals and institutions.” Fallout shelters are more feasible than most people realize, insists Rogers S. Cannell, director of the Stanford Research Institute’s Emergency Planning Research Center. He blames much of the opposition to shelter building on “scientists who hunt for problems that they can call insurmountable, so they can stop working on them.”

Rosy Advice. In trying to eggwalk between such pro and con extremes, the U.S. Government has come up with a program that completely satisfies nobody. To win public support for shelters, it recently issued a 48-page booklet called Fallout Protection: What to Know and Do About Nuclear Attack, which is being distributed free through post offices. The booklet has only poured new fuel on the shelter controversy. Most knowledgeable sources agree that the booklet offers far too rosy advice on how Americans can protect themselves, at cut rates, against nuclear onslaught.

The Variables. Shelter debate is almost meaningless, of course, unless tied to a clear set of premises about the character of a nuclear attack. The effectiveness of shelters would depend on the pattern of attack, the size of the bombs, their accuracy, the height of the explosion, weather conditions, and several other variables, all subject to change as U.S. and Soviet technology moves.

Though the Government’s official shelter booklet uses 5-megaton bombs as the basis for its calculations, bigger warheads, with greater destructive power over a wider radius, must certainly be reckoned with. A 50-megaton blast could ignite frame houses up to 60 miles from Ground Zero, burning or asphyxiating many people in basement fallout shelters—or tumbling their houses down on them. Scientists also think a nuclear blast might produce a fierce fire storm, which would suck up oxygen over large areas and kill all in its path—but no one can be certain.

In fallout protection, people might have to stay in their shelters longer than previously supposed. The Government sticks with two weeks or less, but many scientists now consider one to three months a more realistic period, and some insist that seven months might be necessary before anyone could emerge—particularly if several nuclear bombs were dropped in one area.

Shelter Rattling? Millions would die in a thermonuclear war, but millions of others might be saved by a prudent shelter program. Since no one knows where the enemy would drop his bombs, cheap fallout shelters are a modest insurance for everyone, even in big metropolitan targets. Shelters affording some blast and fire protection are not much more expensive than fallout shelters, and could also be a measure of insurance. Community shelters, to which the Government has now switched its emphasis, are probably more effective than others, in terms of equity as well as effort.

Some Americans oppose shelters on the ground that they would create a national “groundhog psychology,” or that too much “shelter rattling” might provoke the enemy. Others urge them on the ground that they would be an effective deterrent to attack. Neither view touches the crux of the shelter debate. The important point is that shelters can save lives.